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Apple's Spotty Record of Giving Back To the Tech Industry
chicksdaddy (814965) writes "Given Apple's status as the world's most valuable company and its enormous cash hoard, the refusal to offer even meager support to open source and industry groups is puzzling. From the article: 'Apple bundles software from the Apache Software Foundation with its OS X operating system, but does not financially support the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in any way. That is in contrast to Google and Microsoft, Apple's two chief competitors, which are both Platinum sponsors of ASF — signifying a contribution of $100,000 annually to the Foundation. Sponsorships range as low as $5,000 a year (Bronze), said Sally Khudairi, ASF's Director of Marketing and Public Relations. The ASF is vendor-neutral and all code contributions to the Foundation are done on an individual basis. Apple employees are frequent, individual contributors to Apache. However, their employer is not, Khudairi noted. The company has been a sponsor of ApacheCon, a for-profit conference that runs separately from the Foundation — but not in the last 10 years. "We were told they didn't have the budget," she said of efforts to get Apple's support for ApacheCon in 2004, a year in which the company reported net income of $276 million on revenue of $8.28 billion.'"
If you have an example that proves otherwise, feel free to share and enlighten those of us who naïvely expected some informative/insightful comments.
No, I didn't mean to imply Microsoft has any influence on the ASF, though in hindsight it's clear that it will be read that way. I should have written that differently; my mistake.
What I meant was that MS didn't do it for the same reason a Google does it. Microsoft will do this for a while then try to exert pressure in various ways to get their way. Due to the structure of ASF, it's probably hard for them to get anywhere because there are so many different projects lead by so many different people. They will most certainly try however.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Summary ======= Webkit is an excellent example of how Apple takes and does not give. Apple is within the law to behave as it does. We can decide not to like it and not to buy their products. It's our call. Background ========== I remember when KHTML was selected by Apple for the basis of Safari. KHTML had gotten so good that by 2005 I was Konqueror as my primary browser, with Firefox on standby for more troublesome sites. It's speed and integration to the desktop was compelling. So the KDE folks were ecstatic. "Yeah!, we can work with Apple to make KHTML even better" seemed to be the sentiment. The Apple engineering manager wrote a nice letter to the KDE folks to tell them what a bang-up job they did developing the code, and how much time this had saved them. IIRC, it became almost immediately apparent that Apple had no interest in helping to improve KHTML - quite the contrary. They just converted KHTML to Webkit and never looked back. Patches to KHTML were received in nearly indecipherable tarballs. Communication, if I understand it, became hostile and then non-existent. Webkit probably remains OSS only because the KHTML foundation requires it. Apple seems to consistently like to take from a project and not give back to the fullest extent of the law. Apple's mantra seems to be "Great artist steal, then use the massive time savings to add and patent silly "non-essential" features, and then sue everyone on the planet for using something resembling said features." Example: the Safari managing engineer estimated that KHTML saved them at least two years of development time IIRC. With that time they were able to get to market faster and add and patent "non-essential" features like bounce-back scrolling[1]. And then they sued other smart phone suppliers for use of that feature in their browser. Bravo Apple! OSS and proprietary software both have a place. OSS is successful for many products because companies have realized that for core services, it is less expensive and better for them to collaborate on standards-based solutions. Luckily, consumers also benefit. This is similar to how automotive manufacturers have standardized on placing the gas and brake pedals. Apple doesn't seem to like that game, instead preferring the oft-mentioned walled garden[2] approach. But they are happy to steal the benches from the city park to put on their garden path. Footnotes ======== [1] Isn't ironic that patents that really are innovative (like those from Motorola) cannot be monetized to the same extent as silly bounce-back animations because they are considered "FRAND"? [2] Did you notice how with Apple *finally* supporting real dual-screen support in Mavericks, some Apple fanbois were again proclaiming it was like the second coming of Jesus? Yet Windows and Linux had enjoyed good-to-great multiple monitor support for at least 8 years. Ah, the cost of blind faith. Sometimes its a good idea to step outside the walls and see what you are missing.